1981, ink on paper, 77 × 57 cm

“For Géza Ottlik’s seventieth birthday, from the tenth of December
nineteen eighty-one to the fifteenth of March eighty-two, in about
250 hours, I copied School at the Frontier on a 57 × 77 piece of
drawing paper. That’s how this picture was made.” PE

Esterházy’s Ottlik rewriting is the best-known work of Hungarian literary retelling and can be interpreted as a tribute to the author. It is both a tribute to Ottlik and a tribute to the author’s masterpiece, which frames the events of the mid-twentieth century and depicts a cross-section of the (de)formations of human behaviour. The protagonists pass from their parents’ home to the college, from civilian life to the military, from childhood to the adult world, from immunity to vulnerability, to the unimaginable world into which they are forced to cross, and this (border) crossing makes them different.

Another important assertion of the novel is the impossibility of authentic access to the past, the diversity of the memory of the stories recalled by one of the protagonists, Gábor Medve, on the basis of his diary, the mnemotechnical operations of selection and correction, which manifest themselves in the difficulty and polyphony of the narrative.

Esterházy condensed Géza Ottlik’s novel School at the Frontier into a single image. He created a surface that at first glance might seem to promise legibility and comprehension—the text of the book, every single letter (it contains 717,440 letters, with spaces), can be found on the surface—but its superimposition in approximately 47 layers makes it ineffective. Esterházy’s performative gesture, through the process of passing from the medium of writing to the medium of the image, appropriates the text, resolving the conflicts of the reconstitutive code-switching in the impossibility of narration, presenting an imposing gestural image.

As an art form, re-enactment is a kind of (re)interpretive manifestation that never creates a true repetition: Esterházy does rewrite, even manually rewrite, each line of the novel, but he does so in superimposing layers, eliminating any legibility of the writing, creating a gap. The textual illegibility creates the visual legibility, which means that we begin to contemplate this work in its sensual materiality, as an image, precisely because we are deprived of the possibility of interpretation through reading. Thus the image remains transitory or immaterial, which on the one hand leaves room for freer translation/interpretation, and on the other hand leaves something forever unexplored in this incomplete or incompletable object, always challenging the acquisition of meaning.

With his poetic and heroic action, Esterházy attempted not only to read the novel, the story of the characters, the history it describes, to recall it, but also to bring it to life again, that is, to drag it into the present, thus extending its claims to the present day.